The new stopper taking the fun out of champagne

Socialists, the thrill has gone. Yes, this week came news that a new kind of champagne stopper has been unveiled in Paris. The Maestro cap - which we must note sounds disturbingly like some kind of fiddly contraceptive device - is made of aluminium and plastic and operates via a small gold lever. There's still a pop, still a fizz, but, alas, no cork hurtling giddily across the room.

Alcan Packaging spent three years and £885,000 researching the Maestro. It is designed, according to commercial director Bruno de Saizieu, for the "easy and peaceful" opening of a champagne bottle, and, as such, he hopes that it will appeal to airlines, restaurants and women. And, he adds thoughtfully, "For men who feel virile, it is still possible to 'sabre' the bottle." Women who feel virile should evidently seek their fun elsewhere.

Easy and peaceful it may be, yet one can't help but feel that the Maestro rather takes some of the joy out of champagne-opening.

Along with the delights of (a) bubbles and (b) alcohol, the traditional champagne stopper also offered (c) the delicious lick of danger as the cork popped skyward and risked smashing lampshades, windows, the family china - or indeed taking someone's eye out. The Maestro, by comparison, goes nowhere. It is the cul-de-sac of corks.

Champagne is not, by and large, an everyday sort of tipple; it is something we drink to celebrate life's thrills, to toast the unexpected, the sheer luck of love, marriage, babies, and examinations passed.

And so in the champagne cork's unpredictable flight there was always something that mirrored all the gorgeous unpredictability that life has to offer, that replicated the heart-soaring glee of celebration. How sad now, to reduce it all to a plain old cap and lever.